Leaving Neverland
by EevyLynn
Summary: While exploring the small town her new foster family lived in, 15 year old Emma decided enter to an abandoned house that the locals claimed was haunted. To her surprise, she found a boy living in the old house.
1. Chapter 1

After rereading the same paragraph three times, Emma figured she wasn't going to be getting any more homework done tonight until after all the little ones were in bed. As it was, her current foster mom and her four smaller foster siblings seemed to be having a rather heated disagreement on what exactly you needed to clean in a bath before you were considered "clean". Sighing, Emma looked around the cozy living room. The only other teenaged foster kid in the house, Geoffery, was sitting on the other end of couch, dressed in his usual head to toe in black, lost in whatever screaming was coming from his headphones. Figuring he wouldn't help relieve her boredom, Emma put her book back in her backpack and stood up.

"I'm going to go for a walk," she announced, catching her foster father's eye.

He nodded and replied, "Just don't be back too late, and don't wake anyone when you get in." He then turned his attention back to the game on TV.

Closing the front door, Emma breathed in deeply in relief of the nighttime silence. She glanced around a bit before walking down the porch stairs and went right upon reaching the side walk.

Her latest foster family wasn't the worst she's had in her 15 years of being in the system. Mr. and Mrs. Riston were nice enough. They seemed to at least care about the well being of the kids that lived there rather their paycheck unlike most families she's been sent to. She also likes that she's allowed a certain level of freedom over there that group homes don't allow. All in all, she was reasonably satisfied with them.

What she wasn't quite satisfied with was the small town the Ristons lived in. It's one of those everyone knows everyone. The only real hang out place Emma saw was a coffee and sandwich shop that doubled as the local movie theater. Heck, there were only a handful of traffic lights in the entirety of the city. As a city girl, the town really left something to be desired in Emma.

Crossing a street, Emma realized that she was right around the corner from an old abandoned house she had seen when her social worker first drove her into town. Hitching her bag up her shoulder, she decided to go check it out. She tried not to make herself look too obvious as she neared the old house.

The sprawling three story Victorian home had definitely seen better days. Its faded robin's egg blue paint was chipping from the sides. The wrought iron fence that encased the grounds was over grown with weeds and bushes. The extensive garden was obviously very elaborate at one point but was now creeping unkempt across the uncut lawn.

Emma glanced around as she crept closer. Seeing no one, she slunk over to the gate.

Thankfully, vines hadn't grown over it in such a way that it wouldn't open. She opened it just wide enough for her to slip through before quickly and quietly shutting it. Turning away from the gate, Emma eyed the creepy old house. Several of the windows were boarded up, and the door had a massive padlock locking it shut. Emma managed a few steps before she stumbled over something hidden in the shadows of the overgrown weeds. The echoing noise whatever it was made as it hit the fence caused Emma to duck into the shadows. Cautiously looking around, it didn't seem as though the noise disturbed anyone, so she carefully continued towards the house.

She made her way around to the side where an unboarded window stood just above her reach. She looked behind her for something that would give her the height she needed. Spotting an old stone bench, she congratulated herself for working out as she quickly drug the heavy bench to the edge of the house. Climbing on it, she looked through the glass. However, between the darkness of the night and the dirt caking the window, she couldn't see much inside.

Reaching into her backpack, she dug out a flashlight. Taking another cautious glance around, she turned on the flashlight and placed it right up against the glass, so it would light up the inside of the house instead of the glass. Inside she saw faded peeling wallpaper and old winged armchairs with stuffing pouring out.

Putting her flashlight between her teeth, Emma made quick work of prying open the window before pulling herself up and through it. Holding her flashlight in her hand again, she looked around what appeared to be an old sitting room. Greying cushions sat on the frame of an old settee in the corner. The old, faded Persian rug in the middle of the floor was fraying at the ends, and there seemed to be a hole in the ceiling that led to the floor above.

She was heading to the archway leading to the foyer when the light of her flashlight caught what appeared to be an old trunk in the room opposite. Thinking it might have something valuable inside, she walked towards it.

"Impressive."

The sudden male voice startled Emma who let out a small scream as she turned around to see a hooded boy with his hands in his pockets and a smug smile on his face.

"But you could have just used the back door."


	2. Chapter 2

If there's one thing Bae discovered about himself over the centuries, it's how adaptable he is. The one good thing about Neverland was that it was very similar to his home world, certainly much more so than the Land Without Magic had been while he was living in London at the very least.

Growing up poor in the Enchanted Forest meant Bae and his father had to learn extra skills just in case they didn't make enough money during market from their craft. While his father wasn't the greatest of hunters, he did know enough to teach Bae a thing or two about how to lay traps, as well as the best way to skin an animal, so you would be able to use or sell as many parts as possible. Together, they would sit by the fire on warm nights sometimes seeing who could carve a better sheep or dog. Bae's would usually win, and his father would rain praise on him for his craftsmanship. Bae even learned the basics of candle-making because it was "always good for a lad to be able to light his home up at night".

Landing in the Land Without Magic the first time was, in fact, very strange for the boy. The history was different. The customs were different. The clothing was different. The geography was different. The sounds were different. Just everything about the place was different.

Having to get used to all of that without even the creature that inhabited his father's body, much less his father, was quite difficult. He was now stuck in a world with no family, no friends, and no resources to help. He didn't have anything to enable him to get by beyond the absolute bare minimum in this strange world he was dropped into, and so he had to rely on the only thing that could spare his life.

Thievery.

Never before did he ever think he would do such a thing. The way his father raised him was to think it positively vile to rob others of the goods they worked hard for. One should never simply take from another. You should work hard and earn all you possess. However, when the choice to relieve a starving belly was either stealing or the work houses, stealing was definitely the lesser of two evils. The work houses were dangerous, and there was no more guarantee of three meals a day than living on the street had.

Being taken in by Wendy and the Darlings was one of the best things that happened to him, even if it did eventually lead to him being taken away to Neverland. Between the three weeks of living in the crawl space and just over month of living as their ward, Bae was barely there a minimum of two months. However, those two months made him feel more at home than he had since before the threat of Hordor and his men taking Bae away to the ogres. They fed him, clothed him, and made sure that he got the best education he could during that short time he was with them. While he already learned to read from his papa, with the Darlings, Bae read more books than he ever could have dreamed even existed when he was nothing more than a poor spinner's son.

Of course, that all changed when he had the shadow take him away, so the Darlings wouldn't be separated. Neverland was without a doubt Bae's biggest test on survival. He had to use almost every skill in his arsenal to get by day by day. Dodging constables and merchants helped enable him to escape Peter Pan and his Lost Boys, and helped him stay a free man thereafter. Finding his cave was one of the most fortunate things to happen while on the island. It gave him a safe haven as well as a creative outlet as he worked to find new ways to protect his new home from the lost boys as well as create furnishings, dishes, weapons, and other objects. There, he had plenty of place to draw as well once he discovered which rocks enabled him to draw on his cave walls to both help let out some of his thoughts as well as pass the time. Living on the island, he also became very accomplished at many things he never dreamed he'd be able to do as well as now could such climbing, swimming, hunting, and fishing.

When he first found his cave, he started marking off the days he spent on the island, hoping he'd somehow find a way off. However, after 764 days, he realize he was probably going to be stuck there for a long time. While he never did know exactly how much time had passed before he was able to gather the final parts of his escape plan, he did guess it must have been decades that have passed, if not centuries.

When he did manage to get back to the Land Without Magic, things had changed a great deal during the time he spent in Neverland, and it tested Bae's limits of adaptability the most by far. The world had become far stranger than anything he could have imagined. Technology had changed things far beyond even his wildest dreams.

The shadow ended up dropping him off not in near London, England like he had hoped, but in the woods outside a small town in the Americas. Eventually, he was able to gather that the town nearby was in the state of New Jersey. For four months he stayed in those woods, slowly learning about this new world, before he found a way inside an old abandoned house on the edge of the woods that the locals called "the Old Kripp House".

He made a room for himself in the largest room on the second floor. With only one window pointing towards neighbors, it's the easiest to hide in. The other two windows pointed towards the woods he previously lived in, so on days he felt like utilizing the sun for light, he didn't have to worry about noisy neighbors noticing him. All around the room, blankets hung from the walls ensuring that the room stays well insulated from outside temperatures. In the corner opposite the door, but not against the far wall, Bae had set up what appeared to be a cross between a canopy bed and a tent with the mattress on the ground and blankets strung over and around it. An old, wooden desk littered with papers stood in the far corner with papers tacked on the walls above it, and there were several low book cases spaced around the walls filled with books. On every available surface sat candles of all shapes and sizes, which, when lit at night, gave the room a very warm glow.

It wasn't long after he moved in when, after getting hold of a newspaper, that he technically turned sixteen. He ended up holing himself in his room for the rest of the day reflecting that this was his first birthday in well over a hundred years, if not more. It wasn't as if he really celebrated the last two though. His fourteenth birthday was shadowed by the threat of being conscripted into the ogre wars before his father took on the curse. His father tried celebrating Bae's birthday afterwards with the boy, but Bae was still much in shock by the change in his father. Then, he had his fifteenth birthday while living on the streets of London, about a month after arriving.

That was several months back. Now, he was sitting at his desk in the warm light of his homemade candles drawing, when he heard a noise. Startled, he put down his pencil, and carefully walked over to peek around the thick curtain covering the window. He watched as a blonde girl crossed the yard to the house. He could tell she's intent on checking things out, and possibly getting in, so he quickly snuffed out all but one candle.

He snuck through the thick blanket covering the archway leading to the rest of the house, making sure he did not let any light through.

Years of hiding from Pan and the Lost Boys enabled Bae to walk extra softly through the halls to the room with a hole in the floor he could use to spy in. Slowly dropping to all fours, he carefully crept over to the wide hole in the middle of the wooden floors. Positioning himself in a way that he could see but not be seen, Bae watched as the girl climbed in through the window with one of those self-lighting torches clenched firmly between her teeth.

As she passed under the hole, Bae ducked his head away to make sure she didn't see him before looking back. He watched her look around a bit before carefully maneuvering himself to jump down. With practiced ease, he landed silently right behind the girl without her even noticing. Bae quietly placed his hands in his pockets and followed behind her as she walked to the archway leading to the foyer.

Grinning, Bae blurted out, "Impressive."

The blonde girl suddenly spun around with a small scream, hands flailing to the point of almost dropping her torch.

"But you could have just used the back door," Bae's smile broadened as he nodded his head in that direction of the house.


End file.
